Top senior broadcast students will showcase their documentaries dealing with such issues as gambling, healthcare, and fatherlessness at the Spring 2010 Doc Night.
The short films will premier senior documentaries at 7 p.m. on Friday in the School of Journalism and Graphic Communication Lecture Hall.
Students will reveal to the student body life situations and obstacles that are faced among fatherless children, young care-takers, gamblers, the uninsured, and a local women’s basketball team.
Kenneth Jones, a broadcast sequence professor, said SJGC Docs are chosen on a basis of the uniqueness of the story and its production.
Every semester, students in PRodigy, a public relations organization at the school of journalism, are assigned to work on the SJGC Docs account.
They are responsible for coming up with a theme each semester for the documentaries.
This year the theme is “Magic in a Bottle.”
Four of the five documentaries shown this semester will be introduced to the public for the first time; however, the fifth film was originated in 2006 and will be considered an “encore” presentation this year because of the recent national attention regarding health care.
The documentary is called “Reassurance for the Uninsured.”
Professor Jones said the documentary talks about the impact that being uninsured has on an individual’s life.
The students who worked on the documentaries took a lot of time out editing, interviewing, and shooting footage for what could be considered “A” material.
“I went to Miami and got turned down by a lot of casinos,” said Ryan Demetrius, 22, a senior broadcast student from Miami. “Casinos usually don’t allow people to shoot footage if it’s going to make them look bad in the public eye.”
Demetrius documentary discussed how people who are addicted to gambling deal with their addiction and the struggles they face.
“I always wanted to know what was it about gambling that allowed individuals to become so addicted.”
Gambling is just one of the controversial issues documented about during SJGC Doc night.
Tiffany Lewis, 22, a senior broadcast student from Chicago, touched on another situational topic in her documentary.
“I am a victim of fatherlessness. I can count on one hand how many times I have interacted with my father in 22 years,” Lewis said. “All of the pain and experiences I endured due to my father’s absence made me wonder how other black girls feel growing up without a father and how adult women have dealt with growing up without a father.”
Lewis decided to focus her documentary on the impact of black women growing up without a father figure in their life.
“At first it was difficult balancing everything, on top of having two deaths in my family in February. It was just hard internally, but the characters in the documentary were more than willing to offer their time and testimonies,” said Lewis.
A 2 p.m. Saturday matinee of the show is scheduled.
For more information check www.twitter.com/SJGCDocs.